Amidst all the discouraging indicators of cultural decline that assault us every day, it sometimes is easy for those of traditional moral values to miss good news that sometimes shines amidst the dreck. But good news still is occurring, and we do well to take heart from it.

A spate of headlines a week ago involved a crucial legal battle between the U.S. Department of Justice (henceforth DoJ) and Florida concerning Florida’s efforts to update its voter rolls. Well, nineteen years ago, I was at Ground Zero of a legislative skirmish involving precisely the law over which DoJ and Florida are fighting.

First, let’s understand today’s battle. Florida wants to scrub from its voter lists the names of people not qualified to vote – people who have died (so nobody can vote fraudulently in their names), or people who have moved out of state, or people who never should have been registered at all because they are not U.S. citizens. This scrubbing of lists is essential for inoculating states against vote fraud.

Anybody wanting anecdotal but telling measures of the degradation of our culture needed only to attend last week's "Netroots Nation" (hereafter "NN") annual conference in Providence, Rhode Island. NN is a gathering of thousands of left-wing activists, originally convened by the angry bloggers of the Daily Kos, which is part rally, part seminar, and large part grunge-ified party. Because I was speaking at a conference for conservative bloggers just a mile away, I ambled over to NN to see what the fuss was about.

by Quin HillyerImagine if a new, deadly influenza virus broke out and authorities determined that somehow a chemical element in pork helped boost one’s immune response, making the pork consumer less than half as likely to contract the illness. Jews and Muslims, of course, have firm laws against eating pork. Even in the midst of an epidemic, imagine the outcry if the government told a Muslim-owned, or kosher-Jewish, restaurant that it must provide all diners with the option of a small, free serving of pork during the crisis.